On Friday 19 November 2010 15:29:15 bioinfornatics wrote:
> hi, why D language doesn't have a standardization (like iso)?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardization
It takes years to reach that point. While the specification for D2 is now fairly
stable, changes are still being made. You would have to have a very stable spec
before trying to make it an international standard. And honestly, while it's
nice to have an international standard, I'm not sure that it does all that much
for you. Most languages - including many major ones - have no international
standard. For instance, Java, python, and ruby don't have an ISO standard, and
yet they're heavily used. Take a look here, and you'll see that very few
languages have ISO standards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages
Really. I'm not sure that it's all that useful to have them in many cases -
especially when you have a central place where the language is defined. Many
languages are designed by one person or group and have specific language
versions, so you have a specification that tools can use or which other groups
can implement. It's generally a sign of maturity for a language when it gets an
ISO standard, but the lack of one doesn't necessarily say anything bad about a
language. D may very well get an ISO standard some day, but it doesn't need one,
and I don't think that it would really be benefited by one at this point. It's
going to have to be a lot more mature before that's likely a good idea.
- Jonathan M Davis

bioinfornatics <bioinfornatics@fedoraproject.org> wrote in
news:ic718b$1kef$1@digitalmars.com:
> hi, why D language doesn't have a standardization (like iso)?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardiza
> tion
>
Standards organizations very often don't get involved until there are
incompatibilities between competing implementations. There are several
implementations of D, but they are all based on the Digital Mars front end.
There just aren't the incompatibilities out there that require a standards
organization's involvement.
Incompatibilities aren't the only problems that standards organizations try
to solve. But they nonetheless exist to solve problems. There are indeed
problems with D (it still counts as a young language with kinks still to be
worked out and with weak third party support), but those issues are not the
kinds that fall under the purview of standards organizations.
Note that open source development of a language helps prevent the need for
standards organization involvement. This is at least partly why Perl, PHP,
and Python don't have standards organization definition. Since D's front
end is open source, it may never need a standards organization definition.